2012 and google + your world

But I figure I should come back here and do a post – follow my own advice, as I tell all my clients that your blog should be updated at least once a week, at the least. I think it’s been about a month (maybe more) for me.

Oops.

But the main thing that I wanted to talk about today was a recent move that Google has made to more fully include social results in their search engine. But they’re going about it completely the wrong way, and have gained the continued ire of the FTC, who is broadening their anti-trust investigation of the company to include Google+.

Danny Sullivan explains the basics of the conundrum quite well, over at Search Engine Land. Basically, Google is only showing personalized results to those that have a Google+ account, and are only showing in their “social” section of results data that is from Google’s own social network.

They say that Twitter and Facebook haven’t given them access to crawl their networks as deeply as they would need to in order to include those social results from other locations, but this is nepotism at it’s worst.

Many people are up in arms – myself included – for two reasons. Intrisically this social-engine (or at least Google’s execution of it) is pushing the relevant results – what we actually were hoping to find when we did a Google search – down in the results – oftentimes, below the fold. Because really, when you do a Google search – unless you’re Constantine – would you want to see yourself in the results, images or otherwise? If you wanted to find that data you would search your own harddrive.

Secondly, there is the alarming fact that the social results that pull up are only from Google+. Sullivan makes the example of Britney Spears – perhaps the most relevant results for Britney Spears are actually her Twitter or Facebook account, and not her Google+ profile. Google is cutting out whole swathes of results in one fell swoop from the front page of results, and knowingly doing so.